printThe following is taken from my new column, “Crazy Like A Fox,” now on WND.COM:
“From Cleveland, Ohio, Obama issued forth this week with renewed vigor. Media plaudits notwithstanding, the president’s words were either inane or simply insane.
An instance of “insane” was Obama’s professed fealty to a “lean and efficient government.” The trillion-dollar deficit man declared: “I believe government should leave people free to make the choices they think are best for themselves and their families, so long as those choices don’t hurt others.”
On the sly side was the president’s confession that he was propelled to run for president because for much of the last decade, a very specific governing philosophy had reigned about how America should work … The idea was that if we just had blind faith in the market, if we let corporations play by their own rules, if we left everyone else to fend for themselves that America would grow and America would prosper.
Evidently, Oprah’s backing and naked ambition had nothing to do with Barack Obama’s selfless ride to the nation’s rescue; it was the philosophy of laissez-faire capitalism, RIP.
Not for nothing did Ayn Rand call capitalism “the unknown ideal.” This ideal has not been practiced in the US for a very long time; it is a fable that George W. Bush was an unfettered capitalist.” …
Read the complete column, “Crazy Like A Fox,” now on WND.COM.
Read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.
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UPDATED: Bush & Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Bush gave the economy its first stimulus, or “shot in the arm,” as he called it, in 2002. Like Obama, Bush believed with all his brutal little heart that consumption undergirds the American way of life and that any slack in consumption must be filled by government spending.
Bush gave us the Sarbanes-Oxley Act by which Bush federalized corporate law, and ensured that the SEC’s politically voracious prosecutors were able to pursue any business executive as long as a lay jury could be convinced the unfortunate chap intended to mislead or stiff shareholders. The same “capitalism” saw the detestable Decider pass an enormous prescription drug entitlement program, Medicare Part D, and “No Child Left Behind,” which further federalized education and increased the reach and size of the federal government. Let us not forget the “Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)” of 2008, which showed the way for Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in 2009.
George Reisman is on to a complicated concept in a very simple, straight forward way. That paragraph of his in your WND column was a full semester of economics and civics in a few short lines. Bravo George Reisman and bravo Ilana Mercer for whole column.
So our Dear Overlords believes in lean and efficient government, eh? The fact that this didn’t elicit howls of laughter tells you how far gone we are as a country.
Frankly, it might be due to cynicism and old age but Obama does NOT raise my blood pressure like he does to many “conservatives”. I generally find him to be a colossally inane bore. He doesn’t have the snake-oil salesman rogue personality of a Clinton. He doesn’t have that feckless goofy mangling of the English language of Dubya. He doesn’t have that hyperactivity of Bush # 1. As Shakespeare foretold in Macbeth, our modern Prince of Banality just utters a lot of “sound and fury signifying nothing”.
And what do most of these conservative warmongering Republicans have to be angry about? If Obama is the Messiah of Deficit Bailouts, Bush was his advance-man “John the Baptist”. And this is why I see little hope with the Tea Partiers
or Republican “Victory-in-2010”. Paul Gottfired writes about this in the American Conservative:
http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2010/09/08/taming-the-tea-parties/
Most American “big business” (outside of startup industries like computer software) are basically neo-fascistic government contracting, government controlled, and government subsidized entities. Their largest shareholders are Unions, Saudi sheiks, and Bailed-out Bankster Hedge Funds. As you point out, Capitalism is the Unknown Ideal – the miniscule remnants which, like Atlas, support the much larger population of parasites (myself included).
While I was picking my car up from getting it serviced, the president was on the lobby television, lambasting the republicans because they would not agree to dropping the tax cuts on the upper income Americans. He reminded me of why I left the church, all that hell fire and brimstone preaching from a self righteous bigot. Those rich people are selfishly holding on to 700 million or billion dollars (I missed the total) that America needs to pay its bills. I picked up my vehicle and left before he promised to use the money he collected (stole) wisely. No, he wouldn’t make any promise like that, would he.
Best post yet profiling two Ps (presidents) in a pod.
They were a matey pair, not personally, not psychologically, not philosophically, but effectively. The consequences of their actions were the same, as would be expected. The contradistinction of their ostensible motives, as polar as day and night, even if authentically so, were no small comfort – were no comfort at all.